


Just to Spend It With You (Save Every Day 'Till Eternity Passes Away)

by MissNessarose



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Codependency, Emotional Baggage, Flashbacks, Follows the movie timeline but also treads into the undiscovered 90s era, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Trauma (mention), My kids deserve better than this, Sad lil beebs, Scott Summers is an asshole, Sibling Bonding, Sick sweet irony rearing her cruel and ugly head, These kids just want to be happy and have a good home, but the world is cruel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 16:03:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10834626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissNessarose/pseuds/MissNessarose
Summary: Peter and Wanda spent the first sixteen years of their lives together, inseparable, and the next eleven distinctly apart.One forced decision shatters everything either of them knew, and leaves Peter behind as half of what used to be whole.One broken ideal tears them from each other, and tortures Wanda for what feels like a cruel eternity.Twenty-eight years have not been kind to either of them.





	1. - 1962 -

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has consumed my soul for a good five months. I had no intentions of it becoming this long, but...well, here we are. As mentioned in the tags, this is some wholly shameless Maximoff backstory that follows First Class through Apocalypse, and a little while after.  
> If you enjoy ornery mutant teenagers, a single mother trying her best, wrongful incarceration, lots of tears, angst angst angst, and two siblings getting repeatedly wronged by a cruel human world, then please keep all hands and feet inside the vehicle and enjoy the fucking ride, kiddos.

School is hard. They’ve only just started, but Peter’s really fast with math problems, and Wanda’s great at spelling, so their mother’s proud. They have different teachers, but their classrooms are right across the hall from each other, and sometimes they wave when they catch the other’s eye through the frosted glass panes on the doors.

And everything is fine. School is fun, even if the kids make fun of the way that Peter’s blonde hair has started growing in silver at the roots, or keep their distance from Wanda ever since Hannah Ellis laughed at her lisp (leftover from a front tooth that fell out the week before) and went home with a serious nosebleed not half an hour later. But it’s fine, and Maggie starts dyeing Peter’s roots so the neighbors stop staring, and - thankfully - few other bizarre incidents occur in tandem to Wanda, though the kids in her class still whisper about her eyes glowing when she gets angry. 

But kids have vast imaginations, and children can be cruel. It’s nothing.

Sometimes Peter can’t focus and swings his legs back and forth under the desk so fast that he fractured his foot once, and sometimes Wanda hears people talking dark nonsense to her even though no one in class is speaking, but they get by. School is fun. 

Their mother usually walks them home after class is over, but the afternoon is nice and they go to the city park instead. The traffic is loud and other kids run happily between the swingset and other rusty equipment, but the twins are content to remain by the trees and punt a kickball back and forth between them. 

“You’re too  _ slow _ , Wanda,” he shouts, even though he’s grinning. She sticks her tongue out and kicks the ball back, with such force that it sails past her brother’s head and towards the park benches. 

“I’ll get it!” Wanda walks in that direction, but taps his shoulder as she passes, crying out, “ _ I’ll race you!” _

He gets to the ball before a whole second passes, his hair fluttering in the aftermath even though there’s no wind today. Wanda slows down to a sharp halt halfway across the field behind him, her eyes wide. 

“How did you do that?”

He shrugs, and looks at the rubber ball at his feet. “I ran over here.” 

“Yeah, but I got a head start!” 

“Don’t be a sore loser, Wanda, you’re just mad because I won.” He kicks the ball out of frustration, letting it roll to a stop at her feet. She doesn’t kick it back, and when Peter looks up, tears are welling in her eyes.

“You disappeared!” she says, already crying. “You were there right next to me, and then you weren’t, you were all blurry and it was  _ weird!” _

“That doesn’t make  _ sense _ , Wanda. I ran over here, and so did you.” 

“You’re scaring me!” A sob catches in her chest, causing several parents to turn their way. “Don’t tell me I’m crazy, Peter,  _ please _ \- !” 

Fear washes through him like a ripple, knowing full well that his sister hears things that aren’t there - he hears the rumors at school, knows the things she confides in him at night when their mother is asleep and they whisper to each other, huddled beneath the blankets in the dark. He’s seen her move the sofa all the way across the living room once, when he tripped and spilled juice all over her favorite dress. The teachers wonder if something’s  _ wrong _ with his sister - and he knows that they advise his mother to send her away. Peter isn’t sure where to, exactly, but he doesn’t want Wanda to leave him, ever. He abandons the ball to walk back to her, but the second he moves to run, her sobs come in slow-motion, too long and unnaturally prolonged. So he stops - and he is there in front of her, when the world picks up speed again. 

Wanda screams, jumping back and tripping on her own feet. “You did it  _ again! _ Stop it,  _ stop it - _ !”

Her little hands ball into fists, and the rubber ball by her feet is swallowed by a cloud of red mist before promptly popping with a deafening bang. The grass around it is singed with ash.

“How did you do  _ that?”  _

“I - I don’t know, I didn’t  _ mean  _ to!” Wanda is sobbing, still, staring at her hands like she’s never seen them before. The last traces of red mist circle her tiny fingers, and then vanish into thin air. She doesn’t know how she did that, but no one else seems to have seen beside the two of them. “Peter, what’s wrong with me?!” 

“Hey.  _ Hey. _ ” Peter shakes her - gently, because she’s still upset - because if she keeps this up, people will start staring. It’s the one thing that both of them have learned since day one, having always been the token ‘weird kids’:  _ keep quiet, and don’t make a scene. It’s the easiest way to pretend that you fit in with everyone else, to keep the other kids from laughing and the neighbors from staring. _

“It’s gonna be okay. I don’t know how I did the fast thing, either.” He doesn’t want to do it again, really. It was strange and confusing and surreal. “You moved that couch once when I got juice on you, remember? Maybe we’ve always been able to do this stuff.” 

“But I don’t  _ want to!”  _ A shriek tears out of her like a banshee’s wail, and then her voice drops back down to a whisper, punctuated with gasping sobs. “I don’t  _ want _ to be weird, Peter. I want to be normal.” 

_ Plan A: cheer her up and get people to stop staring _ isn’t working well, so far. Their tiny fingers thread together when he takes her hand, perfect little matches that line up just so. “But it’s pretty cool, right? No one else can do that. That’s pretty cool.” 

Sniffling, she wipes her nose with her palm. “Yeah. I guess.” 

“And I’ve got a cool sister, and you’ve got a cool brother. How about that?” 

Wanda is laughing, now, and she throws her arms around him. “That’s pretty cool.” 

They stand there, entwined, whole, until her breathing evens out and the redness around her eyes is less pronounced. “Sorry about the ball.” 

“We can get another one. I can’t get another you.” Having completely forgotten about it, he turns to fetch it - the thing is a deflated rubber mess on the grass, now, absolutely useless and beyond the point of no repair. 

Fear clouds Wanda’s voice when she speaks, in a lower tone than before. “...can you only do the thing when you run, or...?” 

Giving her one bright-eyed look, he takes off towards the deflated ball, kicking it along as he goes. When the world slows into a crawl and then resumes its former pace, he is yards away, towards the farthest benches on the perimeter of the park. Wanda jogs to catch up to him, and her eyes are still scared, but she’s smiling this time.

“Is this yours?” 

They both freeze. The man offering their ruined ball back to them most definitely saw everything - at the very least, he and the group around him saw Peter run over in a messy blur. His smile could very well be a lie; his friendly demeanor doesn’t mean that his intentions are, too.

Peter hesitates and takes a step back, and Wanda falls into line beside him.

“How long have you been able to run like that?” the man asks, keeping his voice low. Wanda doesn’t like it - she doesn’t trust him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peter lies plainly, shrugging. “Run like how?” 

Most of the people surrounding the little bench laugh, exchanging amused glances. One redheaded boy is still chuckling when he says, “C’mon, Professor, they’re just kids.” 

“Yes, but if what I saw just now was any indication, they are like us.” The longer they watch his expression, the more believable his grin seems. “Besides, I’m only curious.” 

Wanda frowns, the corners of her lips turning downward sharply. For such a young girl, such a deep scowl is almost humorous. “Like  _ us?”  _

“You didn’t think that you were the only one, did you, kid?” The blonde boy leaning against the bench smirks, and there’s something about his know-it-all grin that makes Peter dislike him immediately. 

“Prove it, then,” Peter dares. 

The boy is old enough to know better than to go swinging at a grade-school kid, but the look in his eyes says that he wants to start a fight anyway. “Listen, you little - ”

“Alex, no,” someone warns. One girl comes around to the front, and crouches before the pair. “There's nothing to be afraid of - we can do things, too. Here, I can show you.” Peter and Wanda curiously watch the tips of her blonde hair turn to Wanda’s dark curls with awe. They are just as soft and just as  _ real,  _ and she switches it back without much trouble. 

“Can all of you do things?” he asks, looking between the group of strangers. After the initial scare, the thought of having  _ others _ \- of not being alone - makes it all less alarming. Peter looks to the other man sitting on the bench, who hasn’t said much. “What about you?” 

He shakes his head dismissively. “I don’t think - ”

“Go on, Erik,” the man beside him encourages. “He  _ did _ ask.” 

There is quiet tension for a moment before, sighing, he complies. “Do you have any pocket change?” 

Peter hastily pulls out a random handful of coins - one penny, one dime, and two nickels. “Is that okay?” 

“That’s fine.” The coins are strangely small in his hands, and Peter and Wanda lean closer to watch his fingers move, their eyes wide as the metal melts and reshapes: the nickels form two long chains, each with their own charms - the penny becomes a shiny copper sphere, and the dime, a silver helix shape. He hands the finished products back to them solemnly. “There.” 

“That’s so cool!” Wanda cries, slipping the copper bracelet on. Peter claims the silver one, and for a moment they simply grin, entirely enamored by the matching bracelets.

“And what do you do, darling?” 

Wanda realizes, suddenly, that all eyes are on her. “I…” She isn’t sure how else to show him. 

“ _ Sometimes I hear things in my head. Other people,”  _ she projects, looking directly at the first man, their professor. “ _ And sometimes I can talk back to them. But I didn’t think it was weird. Peter and I have talked in my head for as long as I can remember.” _

He seems impressed. “As long as you can remember? That’s wonderful.” Wanda is smiling now, too, even more when he thinks back to her, “ _ I can do that, too. Quite fun, isn’t it?”  _

“What about the thing you just did?” Peter adds, nudging her softly. “You popped the ball.” 

She flinches; that power scares her. It’s something new and completely unknown that she isn’t sure how to compel or control. Wanda shakes her head. 

“I - I don’t know - I’ve never done it before.” The thought of doing it again is terrifying; her hands are shaking already. “And I don’t  _ like _ it, it  _ scares _ me!” 

Tendrils of red swarm between her fingers, and her eyes flash red. A spark of scarlet shoots out, scorching a patch of grass at their feet. 

_ “Well _ ,” someone says thickly, in the awed silence that follows. 

They both spend a minute insisting that they doesn’t know how to control their respective powers, really, it just  _ happens _ , and only then do they realize that they’ve been gone for quite a while.

“We should get back. Mama will wonder where we are,” Wanda says politely, even though Peter can feel uneasiness rolling off of her in waves. They’re so much more interested in what she can do - scared, even - and that frightens her. Her goodbye is more of an excuse to duck away; they’ve wandered away from the spot they said they’d be at, and if their mother has noticed their absence, she’ll be worried out of her mind by now.

They’re both handed squares of cardstock with an address and a few names and numbers scribbled haphazardly on them. They thank the stoic man for the bracelets again, and hurry back across the park, Peter careful to keep a normal pace.

Sure enough, their mother is looking for them. When she whirls around to find them walking back to her, she sighs in relief. “ _ There  _ you are. You were supposed to stay where I could see you.” 

“Our ball got away from us,” Wanda lies, looking sorrowful. “We don’t know where it went, though.” 

Maggie sighs, shakes her head, and takes them by each hand as they head towards home. “We can get you another one. Must have been a good game, then?”

Both make quiet noises of agreement, but share the faintest flicker of a grin. 

* * *

The little charm bracelets become very, very dear to them.

They’re not particularly pretty or important in any way, but they fall in love with the shiny trinkets anyway. Neither of them have had the luxury of a father figure to look up to, so maybe that’s why these stupid little charms mean so much to them. The twins don’t wear them often for fear of losing them, and prop them up neatly on the table between their beds. Sometimes the light catches the metal just right, and casts dancing flickers across the ugly wallpaper.

They spend the next few days holed up in their bedroom, and trying to figure out their strange little quirks.

“I don’t how to  _ make _ it happen, it just does,” Wanda groans, flinging herself back across the comforter. She’s been staring at a book on the desk for five whole minutes, and only succeeded in making herself a little cross-eyed. Her fingers tingle like she’s trailing electricity between them, but there’s no clear indication in her telling her  _ how _ to channel it out. “This is dumb.” 

“Maybe  _ you’re _ dumb.” 

Her tiny brows furrow - if there was anything close to her, she’d throw it in her brother’s direction. “Yeah? Well, then, how do  _ you _ get your thing to...go?” 

“I don’t know.” Peter shrugs and flips the next page in his comic book. “I just do it sometimes. It’s not like I think about it. I just run, and it  _ happens _ .” He looks at Wanda like she’s stupid or something.

“Well, mine isn’t working.” 

It’s a perfectly sunny afternoon and the house is quiet while Peter reads and Wanda stares hard at that same picture book. Moving closer or farther away from the desk doesn’t help at all, and it isn’t until she gets particularly frustrated with it that something actually happens.

“This is dumb! What’s the point of having cool things if I don’t even know how to make it happen? That’s so  _ stupid!”  _

While she shrieks, Peter watches a tendril of scarlet push the book neatly off the edge of the desk, landing with a steady  _ thunk _ .

“There it goes.” 

“I didn’t even  _ try _ that time!” his sister wails, slumping across her bed with a groan. “This doesn’t make any sense, I don’t even want to do it anymore!”

“Wanda.” 

“You have it  _ easy _ , I don’t want to hear it, at least you know  _ how  _ \- ”

“ _ Wanda.” _

“What do you  _ want?”  _ she finally cries.

Peter points at his comic book, now hovering a good two feet above his bed. A thin, swirling strand of red ties it back to his sister’s fingers, and Wanda looks from him to the book before the hold fades out, and lets gravity take it again.

“So you just gotta get mad?” Peter asks, nose wrinkled. “I guess that works.”

Wanda thinks that’s a stupid way to trigger...whatever it is that she can do, but it’s a start. 

* * *

“ _ Mama, look!” _

After three days of practicing with their young powers they show their mother what they can do, and all of the color drains from her face immediately.

Maggie has to sit down. It feels like the air’s been sucked out of their living room. Parenting can be terrifying, but nothing that she’s been told or read about comes even close to this. They’re mutants. Of course they are -  _ just like their dad _ \- and even though she’d hoped otherwise, here they were.

“Mama?” Wanda’s face falls. The couch cushion she was floating falls to the ground like a dead weight and sits there, and Maggie stares at it while the rest of the room spins. Peter vanishes for a half second (he was heading to scoop up the fallen couch cushion and put it back but trips over his own feet and lands, sprawling, across the living room carpet.) Of all the things she'd prepared herself to deal with,  _ this… _

She buries her head in her hands and swears that she won't cry in front of her kids.

When she steadies herself and looks back up, their eyes are absolutely terrified. 

Peter pulls himself up from the floor and reflects his mother's worried expression. Wanda's proud smile crumbles. 

“Mama?”

“I’m sorry - ”

“No - no, come here.” They’re getting too big to both sit in her lap, but they make it work for now. Both twins scramble, frightened, to be close to her. “It’s alright. You’re okay.”

Maggie keeps breathing, reminds herself that  _ this is okay,  _ that  _ they can hide these mutations. They can deal with this.  _

“Can you promise me something?” she asks them, hoping her voice sounds stronger than she feels. The twins nod, their eyes still wide. “Promise me - I’m serious - that you won’t do those things for other people. Okay?” 

Peter frowns. “Why not?” 

_ Shit.  _ How should she explain this? They’re too young to read headlines, to know what’s going on around them. “Well, uh...some people can’t do those things. I can’t. I think a lot of people can’t. But there are very few people who can do special things, and those that can’t are jealous. So, they don’t really like the people who can do special things. Some of those jealous people aren’t very nice at all, and they don’t care if they hurt those special people.” 

Wanda is trembling, her little fingers tight around Maggie’s wrist. She doesn’t want to scare them, but she wants them to know that this is real, that this isn’t a game. She has to tell them this. 

“And if you don’t do those special things, then no one will know you can, right? So you don’t have to worry about those mean people being jealous of you.” 

“So we won’t get hurt?” Peter asks, looking like he’s been kicked. “Like the stories Papa tells?” 

Maggie swallows hard. Her father’s always been a loud and vibrant man, very clear with his opinions. They narrowly escaped the camps when she was a girl, and her parents have already told her kids very watered-down versions of it all.  _ It’s important that they know where they came from, Magda.  _ Her son’s connection is so hauntingly perfect that the realization of it slams into her like a weight. 

“Yeah, baby.” They both curl up against her chest like they were years younger, and Maggie is content to keep them there. She can’t keep them safe forever, but she’ll damn well try. For now, though, this is okay. “And maybe...maybe one day, those mean people won’t be so mean about it anymore. Things are changing faster than you kids know, and I think that there will be a time someday where you won’t have to hide those special things.” 

Wanda shifts closer, tucks her little arms closer to her body. “When, mama?”

“Oh, I hope it’s soon,” she sighs, her voice rough. “You know, I knew a man once who could also do very special things.”

“Really?” Peter wiggles restlessly in her lap.

“Mm-hmm. And his special thing was that he could play with metal. He could make all kinds of things from it, change it and make new things.” 

The twins look at each other silently, and decide it’s better not to bring up the people they met in the park a week ago. 

Wanda's eyes grow sad, and for a minute it feels like Maggie can see whole universes unfurling in that small stare. “What happened to him? Did the mean people hurt him, too?” 

“I don’t know,” she says slowly, her throat tight. “We were friends for a while, and then he said he had to go. I don’t know where he is right now. But I think that wherever he is, he’s doing just fine.” 

She isn’t sure how she feels about Erik, after all of these years...but she hopes he’s alright. They don't know about him, but this will suffice for now. She'll tell them more when they're older.

The kids are surprisingly content to fall asleep on her, small and warm and happy. Maggie sits there, watches their little chests breath in and out, and wonders where the fuck to begin. Things are different now, and she isn’t sure where to start. It isn’t like anyone’s written a book on how to raise mutant kids, after all. Things will just be...a little harder from now on. 

That’s fine.

They watch reports of the Cuban Missile Crisis when it happens, weeks later. Their mother cries, but she won’t tell them why.


	2. - 1973 -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Timing: So in writing this, I realized how fucked Days of Future Past's timeline is - historically, the Peace Accords were in January (but does that film look like January at all to you?), but Dark Side of the Moon wasn't released until March of 1973, so there's no way that that would have worked out anyway?? (Whatever).  
> Just NOTE that we're talking spring of 1973 here, with the events of the film taking place over the summer-ish. Enjoy!

Being _normal_ is hard. Peter gets by, with hair that their mother has stopped attempting to dye another color, and his mutations come quick and fast, and are easy to hide. He’s learned to control what he has, now, and can zip in and out before anyone even misses him. For Wanda, things are more difficult. The voices she hears are stronger, crueler, and harder to shake. She can’t control what she doesn’t know, and sometimes accidents happen.

There’s a boy in Wanda’s algebra class who has called her _freak_ since the start of the school year, who claims to know _what_ she is, and prods her with his pencil in an attempt to inspire a freakout. She’s scared she’ll fail her chemistry midterm, Peter’s been particularly annoying all week, and the voices this morning won’t let her focus, and it’s then, some time in the middle of March, that she finally snaps, turns on him and tells him to leave her alone - and something dark pulses inside her as she shouts. The classroom is bathed in red light for half a second, so quick no one’s sure if they even saw it, and then Tyler Allen is on the floor, twitching, with blood trickling from his nose.

What follows is a heated debate in the principal’s office with their mother screaming back at the boy’s parents and Wanda buried in consistent tears. Nobody knows what happened, but Tyler is unresponsive in a hospital bed somewhere, and they want Wanda expelled - or imprisoned - for it.

“I’m surprised it took so long for something like this to happen,” Mrs. Allen says, after nearly an hour and a half of screaming back-and-forth.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie counters, with a wicked gleam in her eyes that Peter recognizes all too well. She means business. “ _What?_ ”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t _heard_ . My son knew, and I’m sure half of the student body does, too. Your kids are _freaks_ . They’re not normal, and they don’t belong here. And I’m impressed that that _witch_ was able to keep it up for so long before she finally hurt somebody!”

Wanda slips out when they start shouting again, when the principal is trying too hard to keep Mrs. Allen from swinging punches to notice that she's gone.

Peter follows without even thinking, finds her without giving any conscious thought to his direction. He and Wanda have always had a funny sort of inner compass when it comes to finding each other. She's only a hall over, slumped against the lockers in an unsightly pile of limbs and sorrow, hair in her eyes and her gaze distant, trembling.

Nothing needs to be said. Peter pulls her into his lap and their arms wrap around each other until they are one unit that no force can pull apart.

* * *

The Allens try to file a restraining order once their son emerges from the coma he's been held in for two long weeks. They're adamant on pressing some kind of charge, and make sure that everyone knows exactly who “nearly killed” their boy.

In response to the outlash, Wanda doesn't go back to school. It takes two days for the cruelty to get to her, for her to give up and stay home rather than face it - their mother doesn't make her go.

Something in his sister breaks a little, succumbs to the dark whisperings of her fractured mind and pulls her into a hallowed place that leaves dark smudges around her eyes and a heavy weight on her heart.

Peter gets home from class and knocks on the doorframe as he enters, even though they’ve both shared this room in all the time that they’ve lived here. A hum of acknowledgement filters through the blankets that Wanda’s wrapped herself in.

“How was school?” she mutters, peeling the comforter away from her matted hair. She’s asking less out of the desire to start a conversation, and more out of curiosity of what they’re saying when she’s not there.

He laughs. “Shitty. Tripped a jock today, that was fun.”

She smiles. It’s an improvement.

“Did you sleep all day?” Peter asks, kicking his shoes off in wide arcs across the room.

“Yeah.”

He holds his tongue, but he can’t help but think that Wanda looks like absolute death. Today, it’s somehow worse, like she’s been rotting in a shallow grave all morning. Peter isn’t sure that she’s moved from her bed all week.

“Come here,” Wanda begs impulsively, and Peter crawls in beside her like they’re kids again, hiding between the blankets, wondering why they don’t belong among the rest of the world. Years later, nothing’s changed.

Sixteen long years have taught him many things about his sister. Peter picked up on her patterns long ago, and knows her just as well as he knows himself. Wanda’s eyes are distant, like she’s thinking, and she’s looking at him with a kind of pity that puts him on edge. The silence holds the potential to be something else, to let words drop from its depths.

Finally, Wanda swallows, shuts her eyes tight, and whispers, “She’s saying I’m schizophrenic.”

That’s...not even close. Wanda isn't sick, she has magic in her veins. Peter lies there, breathing in the hot air trapped beneath the blankets, and frowns. “No. What?”

“Mom,” Wanda clarifies. She pulls her pale knees up to her chest and wraps one thin hand in her hair. “She’s telling people that I’m schizophrenic. That I suffered a psychotic break and attacked him. That it’s the only explanation.”

“So?” Peter figures it’s better than the whole school knowing about the whole _maybe witchcraft_ thing. “Let them believe it. If that's what they wanna hear. Then, they'll leave you alone. Right?”

Wanda makes a choked sound, and Peter wonders if this is what’s been keeping her mind occupied all day. “But they don’t. Not really. Those kids know I didn’t lay a hand on him.” A pause falls, her eyes darting back and forth like she’s debating whether or not to continue. When she does, Peter isn’t sure he’s heard her right.

“And they’re using it as an excuse to lock me up.”

“They’re _what?_ They can’t do that.” Peter can’t imagine _not_ having her here, being on his own without a counterpart to balance him out. It’s no surprise that the Allens want her charged for “assaulting their son”, but -

“If she says I’m schizophrenic, then they want me institutionalized.”

Peter can’t breathe.

In one fluid, blurry movement, he wiggles out of bed, slams the bedroom door shut, and sits on the floor with his head propped on one hand. “There’s no fucking way. They _can’t do that_. I - I won’t let them. I need you.”

It’s selfish. He doesn’t care. He and Wanda have been together since - literally since conception. He hasn’t known a moment without her, and they have shared the same life, and breathed and thought and existed in tandem to each other. They can’t take her away, because it will tear him apart.

“Mama’s already found someone willing to diagnose me. So they won’t do anything worse.”

“Anything _worse?_ ” Peter’s right hand becomes a messy, nervous blur. He isn’t sure if there’s anything _worse_ than taking her away and keeping her in a cage for all of her days. “This is bullshit. This is _bullshit!_ What are we going to do?”

His sister’s voice is small when she shrugs and says, “We’re not going to do anything.”

“You’re going to let them take you?” Ice floods Peter’s veins. She’s giving up. _He isn’t_. “I’ll take you, we can run, we’ll find somewhere safe, I promise. We don’t have to stay here, you don’t have to...” he slows down and stops when he realizes that Wanda is crying. “You’re going to let them take you,” he says again. This time, it isn’t a question.

“I can’t do anything else,” she sobs, curling up into a ball of close limbs and grief. “People hate who we are, Peter. There won’t be any _safe_ much longer, have you seen what they’re trying to pass in D.C.? They want us _dead_. I’d rather get it over with, save the hassle. There’s no sense in running, in putting off the inevitable - and if I put you in danger, Peter, I’d never forgive myself, I could never forgive myself, not you…”

Every wail strikes his heart like an iron dagger. When her words give way to incoherent mumbling, he crawls back up on the bed, if only to hold her one last time.

Peter promises to himself that he’ll get her back, if he ever finds out how (he’d like to do it discreetly, to stay off of any mutant hit lists - he’s sure he’s on a few already, what with that world record stunt he pulled a while back). He will not forget her, no matter what else they do. They can take his sister, but they will not take her memory from him.

* * *

Everything about the day she leaves feels wrong.

Wanda rises early and dresses nice, and Peter intervenes to brush her hair for her, every stroke a moment to closer to the moment his tiny world comes crashing down around him. She makes her goodbyes, and Lorna cries for her to stay - she doesn’t understand, could never understand - and when Peter reaches for his jacket, Wanda covers his hand with hers.

“Stay,” she says simply, her smile weak.

“You don’t want me to go with you?” He’d planned on this, on seeing her transferred through, on holding her hand until everything was finite and they were shown the door.

Wanda doesn’t try to hold back the tears. All she’s done the past week is cry. “I’d rather the last time you saw me be here, at home, so you can remember all of the happier things. Not in some cold...asylum. I’d rather you remember me looking nice. Remember before. It’ll hurt more if you go, and I...I could never do that to you.”

Their living room feels like a fucking funeral.

Wanda has always been selfless, particularly to Peter, and now is no exception. That she would ask him to stay behind, to refuse his support until the end in order to save _him_ grief breaks every part of Peter’s trembling heart - in a way, it hurts more because he realizes now that this is _real_.

He kisses her cheek and holds her close for what feels like forever and not long enough, until she pulls away and heads for the door.

A smile flickers on her tear-streaked face. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m out.”

Peter shrugs. “I’m not making any promises.”  

And then she’s gone.

* * *

Every day after that _drags_ by, weighted down with an emptiness that has consumed the whole house. Speed is the one thing he lets take over him, in the naive hope that it will make everything else pass quicker, too.

(And maybe it will bring Wanda back to him faster.)

The house is so, so quiet even when Lorna is home from primary school and his mom is in the kitchen, tangled in the phone on the wall and chatting away. Wanda never talked much, but it was enough. They’ve always been together - and maybe he relied too hard on having her there, always there, no matter what, because now that she’s gone he isn’t sure he can function, wonders what to do now that he’s on his own. It feels like he’s the unprepared kid being sent into the world on his own for the first time, sitting on the doorstep with his bags packed with no clue where to go _now_.

His mutation becomes not unlike a drug (he's tried other things, and none of them give him the same kind of adrenaline buzz) and at first, it's something to pass the time and keep boredom at bay. Then it overtakes him, and everything in the world feels too slow to keep up. His body compensates, adjusts to moving in short, blurry bursts, and his thoughts start scrambling to catch up, running a mile a minute in his head.

Sometimes, though, he lies awake and wonders what another day without Wanda is going to be like; he wonders what they do to her there in lockup, like maybe they've already sucked her brains out through a tiny little straw like he saw once in a trashy, gory horror film that the two of them snuck out to see when they were fourteen, and they ate so much popcorn and saw so much blood that Peter threw up later that night and even though Wanda squeezed his hand and shut her eyes at the scariest parts, she never cried, but she's always been like that, always was the strong, silent type of girl who was brave enough for the both of them.

Peter hopes that whatever they're doing to her, she's brave right now.

 _“Peter? Dinner’s ready,”_ is called down the stairwell, dragging him back to the present. It’s a quick run, dashing up the steps and swiping a can of soda, piling half of one pizza onto a fragile paper plate and darting back down -

His mother sticks her arm out and stops him cold, knocking the wind out of him in one sharp move.

“ _Warn_ a guy,” he wheezes, wondering when she learned that that _worked_ , without fearing for any potential broken bones, or loss of limb.

“We need to talk,” she counters, in a tone that warrants no argument.

“Is this about those kids that were bugging Lorna the other day? Because that’s entirely their fault, okay, those little assholes - ”

“No,” Maggie sighs, pulling up a chair and settling down into it. They’ve had that conversation already. “About your other sister.”

It takes those four words for Peter’s heart to lodge itself somewhere between his head and his throat - either way, somewhere it _isn’t supposed to be_. He tries not to sound like he’s going to cry when he answers, “Yeah?” He puts the soda can back down onto the counter so she can’t tell his hands are trembling.

“Would you want to go and see her?”

Peter thinks he would give anything to see Wanda, yes, a thousand times, yes, just to know that she’s alright and safe and okay and maybe not perfectly happy, and that’s fine, as long as she’s alive and as well as she can be, and...and his mother wouldn’t ask unless something was wrong. She’s tried her best to forget about the mistake she made, pretends like her daughter doesn’t exist in order to keep herself from being torn apart by guilt. _She wouldn’t want to go see Wanda unless something was wrong._

“...why?”

God, she can’t even _look_ at him. His mother’s eyes focus somewhere on the kitchen wall, on something he can’t see. “They want to take Wanda...to a different institution.”

Peter’s heart shatters on the floor. “I...what?”

 _No, no, no, no -_ at least here, she is close, still nearby, still so familiar to him that he can remember her smile and hear her voice and feel her hand in his like some weird kind of phantom limb, as if she were still a part of him - and he her - like they _should_ be, and sending her away means for sure that he _won’t see her again_ \- not for the rest of _her_ life - that Wanda will be _gone_ and they will be two different people and not twins anymore, _not the way they should be_ , and Peter forgets how to breathe for a moment until he’s on his knees on the kitchen floor, his chest burning, his ears ringing while his mother nearly tackles him.

He remembers, and the air burns when it comes flooding in.

“I’m sorry. About...are you okay?”

No. He isn’t. He _won’t_ be. Peter thinks it best not to answer her at all. Maggie grabs him by the arm and helps him drag himself into another chair, and he lets it happen, every part of him limp and numb and absolutely foreign.

“Where do they want to take her?” he finally manages to choke out, one leg thumping nervously against the linoleum like a weird, secondary heartbeat.

“Not close by,” Maggie answers, with a bitter, half-hearted laugh. _She has no idea, either, or she just won’t say where_. Both are bad options. “Some specialized institute they won’t give me details of - Blackwell’s? Some sprawling asylum, high security, all sorts of advances  - ”

“So, a prison?”

“Peter - ”

“I know exactly what kind of place that is. Heard all kinds of stories about it. Ma, they say it’s a place that mutants go to die. The place they tell the younger kids ghost stories about. I know people. I’ve heard about it.”

It’s an argument that they’ve been having - and that his mother has been having with herself - for a long, long time. Maggie sighs into her cup, and doesn’t say anything. “You know they’re not giving me a choice - ”

 _She’s actually going to get rid of her. Just like that._ Peter wants to throw up. “You can’t _do_ that!”

“ _This isn’t your decision to make!”_

She can’t do that. They can’t do that. They can’t, they can’t, _they can’t_ \- he's furious and scared as all hell, and his thoughts run through him in time to the too-fast beat of his fluttering heart.

She’ll die. They’ll kill Wanda if Blackwell’s is anything like those rumors he's heard, where they leave people for dead in cramped cells and probably mix spit into their DNA just for shits and giggles, but Wanda would still be strong in a place like that, because that's how she is. He doesn’t even want to think about this, doesn’t want to consider it, because then, with her gone, _then_ , he wouldn't have a sister, no, Wanda would be the sister he _had,_ who is only a memory and a rumor and lives on in the neighbors’ catty gossip, who he'll only have in the form of faded pictures and a permanent absence in his body, a void in his _soul_ , where someone should be and was before but isn't anymore because some racist assholes decided that mutants in the public sector was just a terrible, no-good idea, and hey, why don't we lock them up and test on them to make us feel better about our normal selves? Oh, I bet that'd be a load of fun, guys, wouldn't it? He’ll lose Wanda, and how fucked up is their mom be for just giving them the okay to take her away, like, _yeah, sure, go ahead and snatch up one of my firstborns for your dastardly deeds, that is definitely totally a-okay with me!_ but that _sucks_ and there's no way that she would let them do that.

Right?

_Right?_

One hand is pressed up against his mouth so hard that Peter’s sure his nails are going to leave marks, and he realizes all too late that his last stream of thoughts came _out_ , in a blur he isn’t sure his mother even caught. But she does. She’s raised him, she knows him, and she’s learned to make out sentences from the jumble that sometimes comes out.

“I want to try,” Maggie says slowly, eyeing him like he’s going to catch fire any second. “I do, I really do, but that won’t matter if they won’t let me. If they have the upper hand, they have to take her. So I thought that, in case it...doesn’t work out, you’d like to see her.”

 _Why the fuck would I want to remember what they’re taking from me, because you won’t stand up for yourself? Why would I want to make my last goodbyes to a sister that will be dead soon when it never had to be this way?_ Peter thinks.

“Yeah. I’d love to,” Peter says.

* * *

He’s worried.

Maybe it’s the circumstances, and maybe not, but Peter’s actually _scared_ , in a way, to see her, especially when they don't know if Wanda will be the same girl as before. Peter’s leg shakes the whole drive there, fingers drumming a blurry staccato with no distinct beat to it.

He swears his thoughts are _vibrating_ . Is Wanda okay how has she been what have they done to her can she even talk can she _think_ please tell me she’s alright if they’ve done something to her I’ll never forgive myself never never never _I was supposed to protect her I was_

“Relax,” his mother says, and Peter realizes that he’s been driving his nails into his opposite arm hard enough to leave bright red marks. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you.”

To see _you_ , he notes. Not her. Not after what their mother chose to do.

 _Well_.

The drive feels like it takes an eternity. Peter puts his headphones on, closes his eyes, and lets the road put him to sleep. He loses himself in worry until it clogs his throat and nearly suffocates him, and hopes, more than anything, that his sister is okay.

Before he knows it, there’s a gentle hand shaking him awake. “Up and at ‘em, kiddo.”

The facility rises up tall before them at the end of the parking lot, and if anything in his life up until now has _felt_ grey, this is it. Peter follows the line of tall, barbed-wire fences around the edge of the complex, and tries not to think about it. He puts his headphones away, clambers out of the passenger seat, and bounces in place to try and shake the urge to _run_ from his bones.

“Behave yourself,” Maggie warns him as puts her keys in her purse, a phrase that means _don’t run or do anything to give yourself away so they don’t know you’re a mutant_ , used before nearly any public interactions. This time, though, the warning is so much more ominous because of the potential danger - any other day, giving himself away would mean ridicule. Here, giving himself away means enslavement.

Peter swallows hard, and tries so hard to keep his hand from blurring that it almost hurts. “Sure thing.”

Every step, he feels a little bit more like he’s going to vomit. It’s too cold inside, just enough that he shivers when they pass over the threshold. Instinctively, Peter wants to grab his mother’s hand, but he’s sixteen-almost-seventeen, and that’s stupid. He still wants to, though.

Entering the building feels like they’re being processed as patients themselves: there are nametags to make and papers to sign and IDs to check, and it’s a good twenty minutes before they even pass onto a second hallway. The contrast is startling, from the too-neat, cheerily-presented reception area to the even colder, slate gray inner halls. Peter swallows hard, looks down a shadowed hallway, and then jogs to keep up.

“This way,” the nurse says, with a smile so fake that Peter wonders if he could peel it off of her face. They pass through administration rooms rather than the cells upstairs, dodge between secretaries and stern-faced doctors that Peter wishes he could trip. There’s a big, open room at the end of the hallway-that-stretches-on-until-forever with wide, dirty, barred windows, and threadbare furniture here and there.

After that, there’s a few smaller rooms with furniture that’s just a _little_ more presentable, and the nurse stops so suddenly that Peter almost runs into her. She opens a door to her right and gestures in, and when Peter steps forward it feels like every part of him has been completely drained of feeling.

Because there’s Wanda, curled up on a dusty green loveseat, too thin and too scared and so unlike herself that he almost doesn’t recognize her.

At first, she doesn’t recognize them, either. He takes a lopsided chair by the door, and their mother sits beside him, and Wanda keeps her distance. She looks between them,eyes terrified, and it takes a good minute of strange, suffocating silence before it seems like she even knows who they are.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Maggie tells her, with the faintest hint of a smile, and that’s when Wanda looks up, like she’s just noticed them again.

“Mama,” Wanda says weakly, reaching out with fingers that are practically bones, essentially weightless when her mother moves to hold her. The first five minutes, then, are filled with embraces each of them has been starving for.

But it still doesn’t feel like the perfect, heartwarming reunion that Peter’s wanted for weeks. He’s still nervous, even though his sister is right there, staring back with hollow eyes, and she’s still scared. Rather than catch up and fill in the hole the other has left them with, they don’t talk much. It’s a bittersweet meeting at best.

One of Wanda’s hands keeps twitching the whole time they're sitting there, scratching at her arm like she has some weird itch she just can't reach, and her whole body shivers as if it were thirty degrees colder than the rest of the room (which Peter thinks is already _waaaay_ colder than any building should be, especially with the patients all in paper-thin gowns). Her eyes are all wrong, too. Now, they’re this weird, bright, melty kind of auburn and they’re not _brown_ anymore. They’re too red.

Peter’s seen them _more_ red before, though, so this soft, flickering crimson is...better than it could be.

“Wanda, I - ”

Two choked words have finally come out of his throat when a particular asshole in a starched coat that their mother seems to know comes in, shakes her hand stiffly, and asks to talk to her outside. And the twins both know that that isn't _good_ by any means.

The second they've gone and shut the door behind them, Wanda _sobs_. It's mixed with a bitter laugh that sounds so strangely wicked that Peter can't believe it comes from her mouth.

She hisses, “You're looking at me like you don't even know who I am.”

“I'm sorry,” Peter gasps, wincing under her betrayed stare. “I should've done something, should have - could have - I'm _sorry._ Wanda, I'm sorry, I'm so _sorry - ”_

His voice feels foreign, like another broken boy is gasping the words. They're both crying when Peter jumps from his chair to crawl up onto the sofa beside her and they tangle themselves safe in each other's embrace.

For one lonely second, they feel whole again

“They're killing me here,” Wanda whispers against his chest, suddenly biting down on her lip hard enough to draw blood. She wraps her arms around herself, long nails and whiter-than-he's-ever-seen knuckles, and draws her legs up against her. “I can't do it anymore.”

His sister wants to die.

Looking at this place, and the wounds left behind from tight restraints and too many IV lines, he doesn't blame her.

Peter holds her closer and feels the fried skin at her temples from so many shock treatments and he wonders what that felt like when it was fresh and new and still burnt and he wonders what sick fucks would do this to her, and who would let them get away with it.

“I won’t let them hurt you,” Peter blurts out, a promise he doesn’t think he’ll be able to keep. “I swear, Wanda, you’re so much stronger than any of these assholes. I know you are. You can fight back. You’ve always been smart, so much smarter than me - just find the right place and the right time, and get your ass out of here. You could kill these fuckers if you wanted to.”

His sister’s eyes darken, and she looks at him like she’s staring through him at something else. “I could kill them.”

“You were never supposed to be here. You don’t have to stay if - ”

It’s all the talk they can get in before their mother comes back into the room, tailed by the doctor that showed her out. Her eyes are damp, and there’s a mark on her wrist that looks too much like a hand for Peter’s liking.

When his mother hands a packet of signed papers to the man in the doorway, it feels all at once like somebody’s sucked all the air out of the room. Wanda is going to go away - to a place he's heard generates nightmares as results, where she'll become a sad, frail figure in the ghost story they tell to scare the younger mutants. And the fact that their mother has given them full approval is undoubtedly the worst kind of betrayal he could have ever imagined.

 _I want to try,_ his mother had told him. She was supposed to save his sister.

She didn’t try hard enough.

Guards have to drag Wanda, kicking and screaming, from the visitation room. Tears sting her eyes and her whole body burns with the effort to get away when she realizes what those signed papers mean. _She’s a minor. With given consent, they can do whatever they want to - even if that means taking her miles away from this place, from the only home and family she knows_.

“You _can’t! You can’t, you can’t, please, there’s nothing wrong with me - mama! Mama, please, please - !”_

Her cries fall on ears deaf to her pain, and echo from the whitewashed hallway back to her. The only kindness they show is a swift needle to the neck, letting her slip into a restless sleep.

If she thought the first institution was cold and unkind, this one is worse. Wanda is unsure of where she is afterward, exactly, only knows that this place is far from _before_ , and surrounded by thick trees that securely bar this crumbling building from civilization. People’s hands twitch and their eyes glaze over in a way that makes her feel as if she were surrounded by corpses. The very essence of this place reeks of power and lost potential, and she doesn’t have to reach out hard with the last dying trace of scarlet within her to know that these people are like her, used to have things that made them different from the rest of the world.

They drain power out of people here, render them numb and careless and test on and torture them, dull them with painkillers until their powers can’t do anything to help them. More than anything, this building scares her.

“Where is this place?” she whispers to another patient, the first day she arrives, already feeling isolation even in a room nearly devoid of people. The woman across the table looks her up and down and laughs, then continues staring blankly at the stucco ceiling.

“Sweetheart, this is hell.”

Wanda misses home almost immediately. She misses every little thing about it, even the ugly wallpaper in the living room, misses her family and the carpet between her toes and everything about it that made it feel like a home. It gets better, eventually, when they shock her until she slowly forgets everything, piece by piece by piece.

* * *

Peter doesn’t go to school the day after they visit the institution, too drained and too pissed off to do anything else but sulk in the basement because it isn’t fair and it isn’t right and he doesn’t care, everything else matters so much less now in comparison to the fact that his sister could die any day - could be dying right now - and he would be none the wiser. (Peter likes to think that he _would_ know, though, that he would feel something, somehow, when she went, a thread pulling at his heart from across the universe that would at least let him stop worrying about her.)

In fact, he doesn’t go to school after spring break. _“I’m not going to sit for hours in a place that would kill me if they knew who I was, that did the same thing to Wanda, that will do the same to Lorna if nothing changes. I won’t do it. I can’t.”_ He thinks if he ever set foot in that school again, he’d be sick.

Peter doesn’t sleep much, either, thinking of that tiny sitting room and his sister’s frantic eyes and fragile, bone-thin limbs tucked up around her as if she’d be safer that way. He fills the void left behind by stealing things if only to prove that he _can_ , to show himself superior to people who are too narrow-minded to understand. Before, he and his sister hid who they were to try and keep undetected, to try and fit in. Without her, there’s no need. They can’t take anything else from him.

Being _fast_ isn’t enough. Now, there isn’t any point in hoping, or wasting time on dreams. And Peter’s _tried_ drugs, tried all kinds of things to forget the gaping wound in his chest left because he simply loved too much. None of them work, of course, not in the way that he _wants_. His metabolism burns it all out too fast, without even leaving a pleasant buzz behind.

So Peter runs faster and faster, and doesn’t care if no one can keep up. He knows the local cops by name at this point. It passes the time. It makes everything else hurt less.

They transferred Wanda a week ago, and Peter makes the stupid, terrible decision to steals much cheap alcohol as he can and practically drown himself in it.

He sits in the basement with his newly coveted Pink Floyd record playing at full volume, and he burns through a whole bottle without any ill effects. He can’t even get _drunk_. What a fucking joke. Peter cries the whole way through bottle number two, sure that he’s burned off all of his tastebuds at this point. He smashes the rest of the bottles and containers around the basement, trashes them until the alcohol pools in the cement floor’s uneven cracks.

“Happy fucking birthday,” he laughs bitterly into the bottom of the unfinished second bottle, continuing to sip periodically from it until the record’s stopped playing and his lips are numb.

Maggie pokes her head downstairs later, to see what Peter’s up to, and debating whether or not to throw another load of laundry in. She sighs and wonders how in the hell they ended up here when she sees the mess left behind, and knows exactly what it was about. Tiptoeing through the broken shards scattered on the floor, she leaves a glass of water on the faded sidetable and wraps a heavy throw blanket across the sofa, over her son’s slumped body. Her little boy smells like alcohol and his cheeks are still wet with tears.

He’ll be fine in the morning.

She presses a kiss to the top of his head, and leaves his (few) presents on the ping-pong table. They’re nothing much, but it’s the best she could scrape together this year.

“Happy birthday, kiddo,” she calls back down the steps, reaching for the light switch. “To both of you.”

She’s sorry he has to spend it alone.

He deserved so much more.

* * *

When a trio of strangers wander into the basement asking him to break into the Pentagon, he says yes before he even thinks about the danger.

When he shows up a week later with his face all over the news and the keys to a potentially-stolen car, his mother is absolutely _livid._

“Hey, ma, I'm home - ”

Maggie jumps almost a foot off the sofa and screams like she's seen a fucking ghost. Fear in her face turns quickly to relief, and then twice as fast to rage, at a speed that even leaves Peter feeling a bit winded.

“What in the _hell_ were you thinking?” she cries, shaking the living room. “You could have gotten yourself arrested, in trouble with with the government - _killed! -_ and you tell me you're going to go do who-knows-what, but _no,_ of course not, instead you have to break into the _fucking Pentagon!”_

She's upset. God, she's upset, of course she is, but something in Peter has been torn so raw with grief that he can't bring himself to care. While his mother's shouts still ring through the house, he zips to the kitchen, grabs a soda, and throws himself into the old, patchy armchair in the corner.

“It was better than sitting around here, dancing circles around those stupid cops and waiting to die.”

The noise she makes is strangled, so wounded that Peter's eyes snap up to attention and freeze on his mother's torn expression.

“You think you're the only one who's grieving?”

“I'm not the one who signed my sister's death certificate!”

 _“It was the only choice I had!”_ She sounds just like Wanda did, curled up on the sofa in the visitation room, asking him to die. She sounds terrified. “You don't get that. Either I signed those forms myself, and still held some semblance of legal control over her and what they did to her, or they would rip her from my hands! They knew what she could do, Peter, and they wanted her. They offered me _money.”_

Something hard catches in his throat. “Ma - ”

“They wanted you, too. I told them they were lucky to have the one, and I'm still stunned that they _didn't_ come for you. And you go out and do stunts like _this -_ ” (she gestures to the small TV with one trembling hand and chokes back a sob) “ - and I remember that there's nothing out there stopping them from putting their hands on you. You can't run from everything, Peter, and you _can't -_ I can't lose you, too, please, I _can't -_ ”

Numbly, Peter realizes that he's crying, too. “Ma...? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I'm sorry, really, I just - I miss her so much, I'm sorry, _I'm sorry…”_ Without thinking about it, he crosses to the sofa and tucks himself in her arms as if he were ten years younger. A stubborn part of him still hasn't entirely forgiven her, but he's never, never wanted to make her cry like this.

After a long, hushed silence, Maggie sits back and wipes her eyes, cupping her son's face in her hands.

“I never wanted to have to tell you, but...you're older now, and I…” Her eyes focus past him on the flickering television screen. “Peter, he's your father. Erik. I didn't think you would ever...but - yeah. That man I always talked about - ”

“Oh my fucking god,” Peter whispers. Maggie doesn't tell him to watch his mouth. “The whole time - I was - he - _oh my god!”_

“He doesn't know. He left before I realized...but it's him, and no one else.”

It’s sick fucking irony, somehow, that this all falls into place so nicely. He connects the messy dots and it all makes _sense._

“So how the hell did he end up maybe-shooting the President?”

For the first time in a long time, his mother laughs. “I wish I knew. He was always running off, doing stupid, stupid things. Thought he could save the world.”

The TV light casts crackled, blue-white light over the tiny living room, and Peter kicks the footrest up and lays back. “Tell me about him. Please.”

She does, recounts every picture-perfect detail and lays the memories out in front of them. By the time she’s done, Peter’s half asleep against her, her arm completely numb, and the television is the only blinding light in the darkness.

And for a moment, this place feels like home again.

Peter ducks out to get the newspaper the next morning - if he remembers that the FBI are still trying to ID him, he doesn’t care. The old lady across the street crosses in front of her window and catches his eye. He’s a sweet boy, no matter what the rest of the neighborhood says. She’s glad to see him back. She waves and he returns it, gives her a salute and a smile, and goes back inside.

Over the next few weeks, the neighbors don’t mention anything. They - surprisingly - don’t bother to tip off the police and admit that they recognize the blurry images the news stations are circulating. The Maximoffs have lost enough.


	3. - 1983 / 1984 -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Timing Notes, again: Technically, this chapter takes place in 84, a year after the events in Apocalypse, when they have a nice little team and everything's great (or not). However, enough summary of Apocalypse happens in the beginning that I had to count it as 83 anyway, so...enjoy~!

Surviving is hard.

Peter still thinks about Wanda every day, and the bitter, raw loss doesn’t fade as the years pass by. He doesn’t bring her up anymore, either. There’s a hollow look in his mother’s eyes when he mentions his lost sister that says she’s given up hoping. As far as she assumes, her daughter is dead, killed by a foolish mistake that she let spiral out of hand. _Death_ is something Peter doesn’t believe, because he hasn’t felt anything telling him so. For years, he foolishly hopes that Wanda has enough food, that she’s sleeping alright, that maybe they’ve stopped burning her synapses away in an effort to break her.

The empty years leave him itching for something to _do_ , ever since the Pentagon stunt, something reckless and fantastic - something that would make his sister proud.

But home is _safe_.

For his mother, his leaving would be like losing him, and Peter knows that doing so would absolutely break her. It isn’t like he had a life outside to begin with, so he’s content to stay in the basement and while away the hours. He tries to be a kid for her, if only to keep her from losing her mind.

It doesn’t change the fact that he wants to do something with his life. He’s twenty-seven, and he wants to _be_ someone, to make _something_. The urge is easy to deny at first, easy to drown out with other things, but when all the news cares to speculate about are mutants, it makes him want to run away and prove that he and so many others are more than monsters and biological failures.

It doesn’t help that half of the reports use Magneto as an example - use his _father_ \- to stress a point. Home is safe, but _opportunity_ lies buried among the danger outside.

Peter knows, too, that his mother isn’t blind to his fanatical daydreams. She pulls him back to reality more than once with a few stern words, but she can only ignore it for so long.

Eventually, she has to let him go.

“I can’t stop you,” his mother says, every part of her tired. Peter knows that she’s been beating herself up about letting Wanda go. It doesn’t make what happened any easier. “No one can.”

The crumpled card he's kept since '73 is faded and worn, and it seems a better place to start than anywhere else. (The information sounds eerily familiar, too - the last time he was given a card like this was when he was a child. The blurry memory is old and unclear now, twenty years down the road, but he remembers a bench full of curious strangers they met at the park. He and his sister lost a ball, and...that's about it. It doesn't matter now, anyway.)

And so Peter does what he does best.

He runs.

After the end of the world, things fall back into place. They piece the manor back together, polished and pristine, and some weeks later, his leg does the same. Xavier makes a formal team for the first time in a long time and before long their messy training room sessions become the product of a team that each of them is genuinely proud of. A year after the apocalypse threatened to turn the world to ruin, they have a well-balanced team of heroes and the school is flourishing once again. For once, things are alright.

For now, Peter finds home here.

* * *

For years, Wanda cries for her brother, for the person she was closest to.

It takes four months after her family’s visit for her to forget his name.

The _longing_ still sits, rooted deep inside her, and even when she doesn’t know who she’s looking for, she still cries in the night for someone that made her feel whole. They pull her persistence out of her with needles and tubing and dilute it with medication until she’s mute and docile and can barely say her own name - she is far too powerful for them to carve up and drain like they do the others. Instead, the years quiet her, so that even when she remembers what she can do, scarlet twisting between her hands, she doesn’t dare try to use it.

_(She never catches on that she isn't a subject anymore, but a weapon, lying in wait.)_

Wanda thinks, sometimes, that if she really tried she could destroy this whole complex. She could bring it all to ruins and rusted equipment and slaughter everyone in it, but then she’ll be cold and alone and at least she has a bed when she’s trapped inside. She might have tried to do it, once, when she was younger and still remembered _before_. Now, she can’t remember if her before was better than this at all.

One summer brings the worst storm this old, tarnished building has seen in a long, long time. Wanda presses herself into the far corner of her room, tucked against the wall while she listens to the uneven syncopation of movement and shrieking outside these four walls.

Abruptly, everything stops.

The power flickers out with several powerful shudders, ancient generators failing somewhere deep in the catacomb-like basements of the facility. It reminds her of when this happened before, when a power like an earthquake shook the whole building. When she looked closer, reached out with her scarlet, she felt it shake the whole earth. That was months ago. Weeks ago? Years? It doesn’t matter.

A spark fires within Wanda when the door’s locks hiss, failing, and she realizes that she can _go_.

She wonders if she remembers _how_.

Magic stings her hands, a rush inside her as she remembers what she could and what she can, like slipping into a well-worn pair of shoes. Her heart thuds so fast she fears it may stop as she slips out into the hall, consumed in darkness and distant wailing, an alarm shrieking overhead as guards with flashlights begin frantically patrolling for any escapees.

Wanda slips into a tear somewhere between space and time, loses herself in the shadows of this world before she’s even realized it, and walks down the hall without flinching, passing through the blurry outline of a security guard with a whispery laugh. She is so much more than they know.

Leaving is all too easy, after phasing through what is and was and could have been and might be until she’s slipped between realities and come back to her own, standing on the muddy front lawn at the edge of the darkened woods. _Now what?_ The dark trees loom tall like shadows in the night, their shapes fading into the background, a blur, and the noise of the forest cuts out in one sudden shift. She can hear dogs barking, men shouting between themselves, and the distant wail of an alarm through the trees. Panic flutters for a moment when she remembers that they’ll be looking for her by now, but -

She stops, and she cries out at the pain that knocks into her, a wild animal fighting inside of her. Everything else is unimportant compared to the searing pull suddenly clawing at her chest, leading her through the woods without any indication or meaning. She can’t remember a face or a name, or a reason, only knows that her heart knows what it wants, that it has ached for years, and she wants ( _needs to_ ) find the source. Branches, still wet with rain, strike her face and scratch her arms, her bare feet beat against the hard ground, over sticks and sharp-edged rocks; if her body recognizes the sensation of pain, she doesn’t feel it anymore. The noises behind her increase in frequency and feel closer, so close, but she’s unable to hear the guards or their footsteps on the forest floor any longer - they aren’t what she’s looking for.

Wanda blinks, and finds herself looking up at a house. _Manor_ feels more fitting, what with its elegance and size, and she whirls around, confused, for a minute or so, until she realizes that she can no longer hear the guards behind her. The forest behind her isn’t the one she was running through. The pull inside her reminds her to keep going.

One trembling hand folds around the handle, easing the unlocked door open. The inside is finely polished and well cared-for, but the details are blurry because right now, they are unimportant. They are not what she is looking for. An agonized gasp leaves her lips the minute she crosses the threshold, because now the pain is stronger - not _worse_ , so much as _more insistent_ \- and she is close, so close -

A siren’s wail shatters her reverie and rings down the tiled hallways, the tall atrium above her echoing the noise back to her, screaming. She cries out at the alarm, hands folded over her ears - it reminds her of guards, of guns, sharp needles and shock treatments, wrist bindings and cold, silent solitary rooms and _eleven years and_ \- and all it takes is one blink for the alarm system to spark and combust in one cloudy, red burst.

When it stops and the hall is quiet again, she clutches the hem of her starched, stiff gown, eyes darting around because the guards are still looking, and people still want to hurt her. Never again.

It’s quiet. She doesn’t dare to breathe for a long second until she’s sure, and then climbs the staircase with trembling legs and muddy feet. The halls are long and dark and winding, and the doors remind her too much of cells, stirring bad memories within her until she closes her eyes and lets the pull lead her.

This works for a good long while until there’s a hushed whisper, a gasp, a patter of footsteps. When she opens her eyes and whirls around, there are two teenagers huddled at the far end of the hall behind her, the girl clutching a worn baseball bat in unsteady hands. They study her for only a moment before the girl rushes off, the boy close behind her.

“ _Professor!”_

_“Jean, wait, did you see her eyes?”_

They’re going for help, Wanda realizes. For others. No, no, no - she can’t go back there. _Not again._

She turns and runs. Her lungs burn as she weaves back and forth, ducking into odd corners and taking strange turns. Her body forgets what pain is, knows only panic, because it isn’t important anymore, doesn’t matter, _she has to_ -

“Hello?” There is a young man in front of her, one hand out as if he were facing some kind of animal, hastily brushing disheveled, dark hair from his eyes to put on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her, even with her wild, matted hair, and wrinkled hospital-issue gown. Wanda eyes him warily. She is shaking.

“We can help you here - can you tell me your name? How did you get here?” He reaches to steady her arm and she pulls away, pressing herself against the wall.

The guards said that they could help. And ‘ _help’_ always meant something else. _They will not take her again_. Her heart sears, just to remind her of her goal, her desire, and she presses a hand tight against her chest. Crouching beside her, the man tries to reach for her again.

“Are you in pain? Can you tell me what - ”

She screams, her tangled hair a lion’s mane as she kicks out, trying to keep him as far away as possible. She is a fire, searing and loud, and they will not tame her again.

“Hank,” someone calls out - another man, who keeps his distance. “Hank, get back. Let me talk to her.”

“She might be having some kind of heart attack, professor, she keeps clutching at her chest - ”

“I’ll handle this, Hank, thank you.” He asks the same questions as the last man, leaning over as best he can from his wheelchair. But he also keeps back, and doesn’t infringe on her space. _He’s smart_ , she thinks. When solid answers don’t come, he reaches gently towards the edges of her mind.

All of her has been locked down firmly after the years wore away at _who_ she was. This stranger tries to reach in and break that. Wanda has never felt anyone else inside her like this, dipping a hand into her soul, and it _burns. She will break him_.

The second she feels that barrier waver, she fights back with all she has. A scream tears out of her, unhindered, and she swipes out with one strong arm while her powers lash out, too, locking him _out_ of the swirling madness inside her head.

Charles feels her presence fighting back, sharp red knives in his head, pushing him out of what she doesn’t want him to see. This young woman is a force to be reckoned with, and he smiles even through the pounding migraine her power leaves him with. She will be welcome with them if she so decides. The trouble is getting her to see that they’re not here to hurt her.

“You’re very strong,” he tells her, hands out to show that he means no harm.“There are other people like you here. You will be safe with us, I promise you that.” There are kids, now, leering and staring at her with tired, suspicious eyes, studying her. They crowd around the edges of the hall, creeping as close as they dare.

Wanda snarls, pressing herself farther back into her corner. “My mother promised that they wouldn’t hurt me.” It is the first thing she has said out loud, and her voice is raw - locked down, there was no place for _words_ , only _screams._

Scarlet crackles unhappily in her palms, like the telltale lightning of a coming storm. Her eyes flicker wildly, taking in the growing cluster of spectating students, and every part of her is screaming to get out _get away -_

Charles hates to do this to her. But he won’t risk anyone getting hurt.

_I’m so sorry about this._

Red has burst like fire from her fingertips, and with barely a thought, Charles freezes her.

She can't move. Can't speak. Can't breathe. Scarlet dies in her hands, and a wail vanishes before it can part from her lips. Her head is cloudy with too much shouting, dizzy with fear, and she emits a shriek that no one hears. Her limbs are frozen, mid-fall, and she can't move, _trapped -_

_“Let her go!”_

She doesn't recognize the boy edging his way towards her through the crowd, but there's something in his face that is so _familiar._ He's terrified...and sad. He looks like he's seen a ghost.

“Peter, be careful - ”

“Let her go, please - please, she's just scared!” He’s hesitant to touch the field around her. One of his hands is trembling so fast that it’s a strange blur at his side. “Don't _touch_ her - that's my _sister!”_

She can’t make out the words being exchanged back and forth, too far gone in her panic to understand - and then, the freeze falls away from her bones and she slumps to the floor like a ragdoll. The pain in her chest stops.

“What did you do to her?” Peter asks, dropping to her side. She jerks unsteadily, her eyes unsure. “...what the hell did they do to you?”

One pale hand reaches for silver hair, trying to remember where she has seen him before, and why all of her feels so whole, now that he’s here. Without thinking, she is crying, and a sob shudders out of her as tears pool in his eyes.

“Wanda? Hey, it’s me.” He places his hands against hers with an unsteady grin, their palms and fingers still matching up clumsily. “It’s just me. You’re okay, yeah?” Her palms move to his face, tracing features that she _knows_ , details that parts of her remember from years ago.

Peter. Her _brother_. Yes, she knows him.

It’s been so long since they’ve seen each other.

“Peter?”

“Yeah, sis. I’m right here, Wanda. It’s okay.”

Wanda _._ _Maximoff_ was the only thing the guards barked at her, desiring something that made her less _human_ and more _monster._ She hasn’t been called just _Wanda_ by someone else in a long time.

She holds her brother’s face in her skeletal hands, and she cries. Every part of her goes numb, immediately loses its tension because she knows she is safe here, that she doesn’t need to fight any longer. Wanda slumps against him, tears still clotting her throat as she cries, overwhelmed with what eleven wrong years left her with. Now, she’s _home_.

“Give her some space, please?” Peter asks over his shoulder, never tearing his eyes away. Slowly, the crowd tapers off, uninterested, and they sit in the corner together, wrapped around each other, using tears and whispered apologies to make up for lost time.

It takes a few minutes for Wanda to feel the rest of her coming down from its alarm-state high, and then the blurry edges of the hallway settle back into solid lines and shapes, the world falling back into place. By then, the kids have all gone back to bed, and she has found what she was missing.

“I forgot you,” she whispers, pressing her cold hands to his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I forgot. They burned, they tore it from me, I forgot everything, but I knew - I knew I needed something, needed someone. I just didn’t know it was you.”

“If that feeling led you here, then you didn’t really forget, did you?”

Her face crumples, and gives way to silent cries. Faded picture-book memories of their childhood come back in jagged puzzle pieces, where every moment they breathed was each other, when they shared a room and everything else in their lives. He wonders how he got through the long years in between without her. Peter holds her close, as if he were the only thing shielding her from the rest of the world. They won’t hurt her again.

“Is she alright now?”

He forgets that they aren’t alone.

“I think so,” he says to Charles, his throat tight. “It - she was - it’s been a long time.”

The returned smile is kind, even though it’s late, and tonight has been quite the event. “She’s welcome here if she likes. I’m sure we can find a room - ”

“No, no. No, she’ll be fine with me,” Peter says quickly, words tripping over themselves as they part from his lips. “Thanks,” he adds wearily, as an afterthought. He pulls Wanda to her unsteady feet with one strong tug, heaves all of her trembling weight up against him, and heads back to his room.

They walk in silence all the way across the manor, taking it slow on the staircase because Wanda’s legs are still shaking so badly. Their steps match on the polished flooring, a strange, mismatched staccato beat. Wanda loses herself in the swarm inside her head, and when she comes to they’re stopped in an alcove a floor above, with a wide picture window to her left showing an open view of the darkened grounds outside. This place seems so much more beautiful in the dark.

“Welcome home,” Peter says half-jokingly, easing open the door. The room is messy, something Wanda finds strangely comforting, with articles of clothing and all kinds of papers tossed here and there. The desk in the corner is surprisingly clean - probably due to disuse - and the bed in the corner is filled with all kinds of thick, crumpled blankets. One window casts distorted shadows across the floor, and offers a view of backyard gardens she hadn’t seen on her way in. This place feels like it could be a hotel. It _could_ be home.

“Here.”

Wanda recoils sharply when something is suddenly tossed her way, throws her arms up to guard and ducks her head down.

“Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t…” Peter looks something between sorry and disgusted at her reaction, a chord struck within him at her reflex. “Clothes. Don’t figure you want to sleep in that.”

Wanda runs a hand along the crumpled gown she wears, and shakes her head. If she can, she’ll burn this thing once she gets it off. It’s the last part of her that still reeks of cold hallways and uncomfortable isolation. “No. Thanks.”

The wrinkled plaid pajama pants she picks up off of the floor (most likely left there for some time, but eleven years in a cement cell don’t leave you very picky) slide on easy underneath the gown, a strange feeling after having bare, cold legs for so long. She twists an arm behind her to start pulling at the line of bows along the back slit of the gown, but can't quite reach all of them.

“Do you want me to - ?” Peter reaches out, an offer to help, and Wanda pulls away from his outstretched arm before she remembers who she’s with and where she is.

“Sorry,” she says softly, hating how weak her voice sounds. “Could you?”

“Yeah.” Her brother swallows back tears as he pulls the string of each tiny knot, every pulled loop a reminder of where she was and what they made her, each tug freeing a part of his sister from the stiff, hardened resolve of a fire-breathing woman that grew around her. “There. All done.”

She tenses when the cool air strikes her bare skin, pulls away as quick as she can to face him again and clutches the crumpled gown to cover breasts he knows she didn’t have when they were sixteen, when their bodies were still uncomfortably tall and awkward in every way possible. While she turns her back to him and tugs on a faded Dark Side of the Moon tee, Peter stands back and has a chance to finally get a good look at the toll time has left on his sister. Smudged shadows line her eyes like smeared makeup, and her face is thinner now, chiseled and sharp, looking like a corpse freshly pried from the grave. When she tosses the gown aside to pull the shirt over her head, he can count the ribs jutting through her side and follow the knots of her spine down to where the pajama pants rest low on her narrow waist. He could probably fit his hands around her waist.

They stand there, just looking, for what feels like the longest time. There’s so many things about the other that they don’t recognize anymore, leaving a hollow, bitter feeling behind. They’ve both suddenly returned to a relationship they left behind long ago.

“It’s late,” Peter mutters, when he notices the reddened circles along her arms that so many needles and tubes left behind, and thinks he might be sick. “You’re probably tired.”

“Yeah.” Wanda’s distracted, too, looking too small in his borrowed clothes. He lets her go first to the bed, peeling back the comforter and assorted blankets to slide up against the wall, as far from the door as possible.

For the first few minutes, Peter's afraid to get too close to her. Already once, he has lost her - he doesn't want to lose her again.

The darkness in this tiny room feels suffocating, silence dancing around the tiny bed in the corner. They lie side to side and trace constellations in the ceiling; it's another five minutes before Peter gathers the courage to ask anything. So much of him wants to know how she's been, wants to know how she's here, even if the answer might tear him apart.

“I...you don’t have to tell me what they did to you in there, what it was like. But if you want to, I...I’m here. If you need me. Because what they did, what mom did…”

Wanda flinches at the mere mention of the woman that raised them, steadies her breathing before she can remember all that they did to her.

“...it was fucking terrible. So if you want to talk, I’d like to listen - I’d _love_ to listen. I’ve missed you so much, every day since you left, and I...” Peter’s knuckles tighten around the blankets in his fist - when a choked sob slips out, Wanda tucks herself up against him, and pretends that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

If she closes her eyes tight enough, it feels just like home.

* * *

When Wanda wakes up the next morning, Peter's gone. Her chest is tight with the worry that she's alone again, that she'll never find him again.

Then she remembers the borrowed clothes she slept in, feels the dried tears on her cheek and takes the open window and rays of sunlight as a sure sign that last night wasn't some strange fever dream.

Somehow, the house feels much bigger the second time around. She pads downstairs in bare feet and unbrushed curls, dodging stares from curious eyes. Some recognize her from last night, and those who don’t are just as uneasy. When she steps into the kitchen looking particularly disheveled, more than one of the younger kids ducks beneath the table.

 _They’re afraid_ , she realizes, as power crackles like electricity between her fingers.

“Oh! Hey - ” Peter catches her eyes across the room and crams the rest of a slice of toast into his mouth, dumping plates in the sink and coming to her in a quick-as-lightning blur. Relief floods her veins, and her instinctive defensive measures die away just as quickly as they came. “Thought you’d sleep in longer, sorry - come on, I’ll see if I can find something else you can wear.”

Wanda follows him out the door and to the left down another hall, and is thankful for a chance to get away from prying eyes. “I’m hoping I won’t have to wear your clothes forever?”

“Nah, of course not. Got a whole room of donated junk down here somewhere.” Peter blurs away, throwing doors open all down the hall until he finds what he’s looking for. “Here we are! Have at it, sis, take what you like.”

She sorts through the racks of clothes with a slowness that surprisingly doesn’t bother Peter. While Wanda flips through the items and digs through musty boxes with a practiced caution, he’s content to lean against the wall and wait for her. He hums something he heard the other day and forgets the world around him - when he opens his eyes again, she’s done, her rumpled clothes replaced by a mature red-and-black ensemble that isn’t too flashy and feels so very _her_.

“Done,” Wanda announces, smoothing her curls back under a black cloth headband. “Anything else to do around here?”

“Oh. Right.” It somehow escapes his mind again that she doesn’t know this place well - Peter’s glad that he’ll have to show her around for a while longer, because at the very least, it will keep her close to him. Places and plans run through his head in a fitting blur, but they stop short when he remembers something more important.

“Oh, sorry, almost forgot - the Professor wants to talk to you.”

They walk back the way they came in uncomfortable silence. Wanda is tense - so tense he can _feel it_. The rooms in the manor make her feel confined in a way that reminds her of things rather left forgotten, and Xavier’s office is no exception. Tall bookshelves line the sides, exerting a sense of professionalism, but it makes Wanda feel like she’s somehow in trouble.

“Hey, you’re not in trouble,” Peter says, reading her thoughts like an open book - like when they were younger, when they were one whole and not two uneasy halves. His smile puts her immediately at ease, though anxiety still rumbles low within her like an unsteady storm. “I’ll be right there the whole time.”

“Do you promise?”

When genuine distrust flickers through Wanda’s eyes, Peter’s face falls.

“Yeah. I promise.”

Even so, their meeting doesn’t go well. He wants to know about _before_ \- about the cell she was kept in, what they did and who was there. The memories are too raw, too fresh, and when Charles asks her questions about her time in the institution, she can’t help but let it overtake her. She describes Blackwell’s in picture-perfect detail, and Charles seems to know the place too well. He is kind and calm and doesn’t rush her, but once she slips back into that dark place, it’s hard to find her way out.

When she comes to, a coffee table is overturned with its glass shattered all along the floor, books have been thrown from the tall shelves, and the curtains are singed with scorch marks.

Wanda hates that that place still has such a hold on her. She doesn’t need to ask if she did that - the horrified look in her brother’s eyes the only clarification she needs.

“I...I’m sorry.” The voice that comes out doesn’t feel like her own.

Charles is looking at her strangely, eyes filled with something between sympathy and awe. He clears his throat, looks at the mess around him, and shakes his head. “No, it’s quite alright. I’ve heard enough to know the rest. I’m sorry I had to ask.”

Wanda nods, her hands trembling, and mutely follows her brother from the room.

“Hey. Wanda? You all there? You okay?” Peter has his hands strong around her shoulders, gazing into her eyes like he’s looking for something. It feels like she’s only just noticed him, and she wonders how long he’s been trying to get her attention.

“I don’t want to go back there,” she whimpers, sounding just like she did when she was sixteen.

“You don’t have to. I won’t let them. C’mere, I want to show you something.”

She comes willingly when Peter nudges her along into a walk beside him, but her eyes are unfocused and he has to practically lead her every step. There’s a little room towards the back of the first floor that’s still unused - nobody notices it, and it’s a project that’s kept him plenty busy.

“I threw it together when my leg was still busted and I couldn’t really run more than five feet. Found a couple things lying around when they were still putting the rooms together. It’s not much, but it - ”

“It feels like home,” Wanda finishes, unable to stop herself from showing a small smile. The armchair and sofa are timeworn and still reek of the 70s, and there’s something about the shitty little television in the corner that reminds her of the cold basement where they spent so much time together.

“I couldn’t fit a ping pong table in here, of course, but I did try.”

Wanda didn’t expect any less.

* * *

They fit back together like they’d never been torn apart. Weeks pass by uneventfully, and Wanda eases comfortably into life in the manor. Charles has been pushing for her to teach a course on telekinetic control, and Wanda has a feeling that he’ll keep asking until she finally agrees. She adjusts to the school’s cramped halls, becomes more at ease with the students and the odd stare. Peter introduces her to a few friends, and though she never contributes much to the conversations, it’s nice to sit among people she knows.

Slowly, she and her brother fall back into step with one another, stronger at the seams and whole once more. Wanda’s barrier between their thoughts disappears almost completely over the next few days, and their conscious and subconscious bleed into one until they can talk with merely a thought, and nearly predict the other’s movements. Their days are filled with each other, and for a long time it feels to Wanda like she’s finally found somewhere she belongs.

The feeling doesn’t last long.

Some kids brush by without making eye contact with her, still afraid after seeing her on her first night at the school. Some have seen her practicing outside, know her unstable powers and their tendency to go haywire. It’s easy to pretend otherwise when they’re alone, but seeing the fear in their eyes only confirms the fact that the students don’t trust her. It isn’t her fault that she still can’t control the power inside her.

Some days are good. She’ll sit in the lounge with her brother and talk to his friends, happy to be with people and lounge out in the open. They go out and stay out late, laugh too hard and enjoy themselves too much.

Some days aren’t good. Sometimes, the memories come back to her like the rising tide. If Wanda doesn’t bury herself in their shared bed and try despairingly to quell the anxiety and panic in her, she’ll try her best to contain it and inevitably lose herself in scarlet, turning outdoor practice sessions into uncontrolled fury and any interactions into potential attacks.

Sometimes, on the not-so-good days, they wander through the halls to ease her mind. More often than not, Peter’s hand is wrapped securely around hers (both to keep Wanda at ease, and to keep her from getting away).

In all of this, Peter is the one thing anchoring Wanda down and keeping her tethered securely to reality. They’ve always been close, and their separation only solidified their increased attachment once they finally found each other again.

Unfortunately, their entwined hands and incessant closeness brings the wrong impression (and maybe not - each cannot imagine living life without the other, and it’s very clear that no one will be the perfect match that their twin provides). It doesn’t take long for the harassment to start.

“Hey, Maximoff, you and your sister get to second base yet?”

Jean elbows him sharply. “Scott!”

“Can it, Summers,” Peter spits. It isn’t a good day, and Wanda’s hand is trembling in his own. He’d rather not stop and risk throwing her off the precipice, letting loose whatever storm is building inside her. They keep walking.

“What, she can’t even defend herself? Did she have a babysitter in that madhouse, too?” he calls after them. _Being self-elected team leader’s really gone to your head, asshole_ , Peter thinks, the second before he turns around, wholly intending to punch this kid’s teeth in.

Wanda beats him to it. She sinks a little lower into the dark slump she’s been in all morning, and it takes little effort for her scarlet to wrap Summers in a cocoon, lift him a good nine feet off of the ground, and throw him against the opposite wall hard enough to knock him out cold.

They’re in Xavier’s office no less than two minutes later.

“While Scott’s commentary was uncalled for - ”

“Un - _uncalled for?_ ” Peter seethes, twitching with the need to - literally - run off his steam. This is bullshit. This is absolute _bullshit_ . “That's _it?_ She was tortured and tested on for ten years - he can make all the jokes he wants, he doesn’t know what it was like! Trauma isn’t something you fucking joke about!”

“You cannot solve all of your problems by lashing out!”

“Why not?” Wanda asks solemnly, her eyes glazed over with some distant shadow. “Why shouldn’t I? They broke me, they thought they could control me, and they can’t. They will not trap me again. I am more powerful than they know, more than _any god they have ever thought worthy, I have breathed realities and shattered men into dust!”_

Her declaration rings in the office, makes the bookshelves tremble. Charles holds a hand out as if to placate her in some way, though it’s too close to his temple for Wanda’s liking. She makes a low noise and steps back, her glare daring him to dip into her corrupted mind again.

He doesn’t. But he does look between them like a disappointed father would, despite the fact that they’re a bit old for that sort of guilt trip. Nonetheless, the guilt still seeps into their pores, mingling with the ashy remnants of anger left behind.

Charles sighs. “Peter, I expected better from you.”

He stands there at his sister’s side, breath still coming heavy, _stunned_ by all that’s being said. “Really? I’m not going to stand there while this punk talks shit about my sister - maybe that’s not the way you do things around here, but that’s good enough for me! I’ve been sick of the way that kid put himself in charge - he’s a self-entitled asshole who can’t lead for shit -  and I’m not going to sit here and let him walk all over us anymore.”  

Wanda smiles when she remembers what it felt like, throwing Scott against the wall.

“While I can’t speak on Scott’s behalf, I’m certain that you could have done much more instead of blatantly _attacking_ him,” Charles frowns, grimacing as if he already has a headache starting. His voice is short and clipped, words carefully chosen so as to remain neutral and objective. “And what in the hell brought all this on? You haven’t said a word about any problems with the team, Peter. Perhaps I was wrong, but I had previously assumed you were perfectly happy here.”

They’ve been talking, the two of them: about the past, about the potential future. About things going on around them while they waste their time. Peter wants to do something productive; Wanda wants to make a difference. They don’t want to wait any longer for things that have been put off for too long already.

Peter turns away, begins pacing to try and keep himself from jittering. Irritation still colors his tone, littered in between with rage. “I was lucky enough to get Wanda back. I know you’ve lost kids, too, I’ve heard things. And I don’t know if maybe you’d rather play house instead, but people like us are still _dying_ out there, are still locked up in facilities like lab rats while your kids run around and go on mall dates! We’re gifted. We’re _superior_ . And if we don’t use what we’ve been given - if _you_ don’t, god, you’re one of the most powerful people I’ve ever met and you’ve barely done a damn thing - then how the hell do you expect to protect those around you? You want so, so badly to keep all of those fucking kids safe, but you won’t be able to do a damn thing if you don’t fight back!”

It all spills out before he can stop it, but...it’s been said. Things he’d been meaning to say for the past few weeks are now out on the table, and he honestly couldn’t give two shits. Wanda meets his eyes and gives the briefest nod of approval.

Charles laughs into one hand, shaking his head slightly. “You sound just like your father, both of you.”

Peter keeps shouting, his eyes livid. “And he had the right idea, wanting to fucking _do_ something! The news gets darker and darker every _fucking_ day, while we sit here and order pizza and pretend that kids your student’s ages aren’t getting gutted in some back alley in the name of _science_ \- !”

“That’s _enough_.”

The coldness in his voice is enough to startle them into stillness, but while Peter falls quiet, he still bounces a little on the balls of his feet, waiting for Charles’ ultimatum.

“I thought you were both content here, but...I cannot afford any larger strategies with what we have available to us here. You’re both welcome to do whatever damn fool thing you like. I’m not holding you hostage here. You’re allowed to leave.”

It’s both a suggestion for the future and a demand for the present. Peter spins on his heel and darts out of the office before Wanda can follow, and she closes the door behind her in one scarlet motion that sends it slamming into its frame. The sound echoes down the hall, too loud in the uncomfortable silence.

“I can’t - can’t _fucking_ believe - !” Peter mutters, half there and half a blur. “Fine. _Fine!_ Fuck him, fuck this place - fuck their ideals, I want to _do something!”_

“Then we’ll do something,” Wanda says firmly, reaching for her brother’s trembling hand. “We’ll go.” Her lips curl up into a wicked smile. “Fuck their ideals,” she repeats, grinning.

“Fuck whose ideals?”

They spin around like they’re children caught with one hand in the cookie jar, eyes wide until they realize who it is. Erik looks only mildly concerned, one eyebrow arched in an accusing way. “I could hear the shouting from downstairs.”

“We were just - ”

“We’re doing something with our lives,” Peter blurts out, cutting Wanda off. “We’ve got gifts, and we’re going to fucking use them instead of sitting here waiting to get slaughtered, letting mutants get killed in our place. We’re going to be heroes.”

He looks between them, somewhere between amused and disbelieving. “That’s awful noble for a couple of kids.”

“We’re twenty-eight,” Wanda snarls. “And I have more power in my little finger than most mutants. “We can do whatever we want. We don’t need them,” she declares firmly, every part of her strong and stern and set on this ideal now that she’s thought of it. “Not anymore. Xavier will not control who we are - if he thinks he can, then he’s no better than the rest of humanity. And they are cruel and unkind, and a few nice, pretty words aren’t going to change their minds anytime soon. We don’t belong here, as we have never belonged anywhere - everyone has _left us and abandoned us_!”

Erik takes a step back. “And you believe that running off on your own will change that?”

Wanda’s knuckles tighten. “My mother let them take me, and try their best to ruin me! I have been abandoned and branded an outcast, I have no parents and I have no one else. And I would much rather _run off on my own_ to save my people than teach a bunch of children how to light a fucking match! We’re leaving. Tonight.”

 _Leaving_ . They’re just going, then. It’s not that Erik feels particularly close to either of them, but he’s never seen anyone want to _leave_ the mansion before. It’s sad, almost.

Life has broken these kids, torn them apart and tarnished every dream they once had. “I’m...sorry. Your parents, what…?” Words never came to him easily, particularly sympathetic ones. But they remind him of his daughter, in a strange way.

“Our mother wasn’t strong enough. She did her best, but…” Wanda’s eyes grow blurry with long-lost memories. “She didn’t know how to raise us in a world that hated us so much.”

“Your father?”

Wanda gives her brother a sideways glance and settes for, “He left. When we were young.”

Erik only nods - there’s nothing else left to say. The silence between them is weighted with something unspoken.

Impulsively, Peter gives in and blurts out, “Do you remember Magda Maximoff?”

Wanda kicks him sharply, her eyes aflame. ‘ _Peter, don’t.’_

 _‘It’s now or never,’_ he thinks, loud enough that she winces. ‘ _Worst case scenario, he’ll deny it, and we still won’t have the father we never had. Better late than never.’_

Peter steadies himself, clears his throat. “Do you remember her?”

Erik frowns. “I - ”

“She had a six-month fling with a guy in 1955. Changed her name to Margaret when her family fled to the States. Goes by Maggie now. Said this guy was a German refugee. Who could do some... _weird_ things with metal.” His words come cautiously, each one a step closer to a past they didn’t have the luxury of owning. And something in Erik’s eyes shifts with every passing second.

“...you said her name was Magda?”

“And this guy up and left her, kissed her goodbye and said he had to go. And in 1956, she gave birth to twins.” He only has to gesture vaguely between himself and Wanda to make his point.

For a long time, Erik just _looks_ at them, tries to match years long past to outdated, black-and-white memories. It seems so blatantly obvious when he looks closer, recognizing Magda’s eyes in Peter's, or how the slope of Wanda’s nose reminds him so much of his mother's.

His kids. Life has broken _his_ kids.

“My god…”

“We don't - we don't want anything,” Peter says quickly, as Erik cards his fingers back through his hair, blinking blindly. _Poor guy looks like he’s seen a ghost._ “I just - we just - thought you should know. After twenty-eight years. Because we're leaving.”

Right. Right. Oh _, god -_

“You don’t have to…” When Erik looks back up, they’re gone, the faint remains of a breeze the only indication that anyone had been there before. They’re _going_ , and it feels like he should do something about it before it’s too late. But, they’ve made their decision…

He has lost one child already. He will not lose two more.

And Erik knew that they must have been his, in that moment, because he would have done the same fucking thing.

* * *

Gathering what little things they have feels like they're finally leaving home for the first time. Not much expresses the need to be brought along - other than the clothes on their back, Wanda brings a worn over-the-shoulder purse that they fill to the brim with what money they have and a few stolen papers to get their search started. Sentimental items aren’t something they’ve been allowed as of late. All that's left to do is get going, with no real plan in mind or route set. The world is open before them, and they’ll take it day by day.

Slipping out takes less than a second, all too easy (even if it leaves Wanda with a little vertigo), and the night around the manor is eerily calm while she tries to catch her breath.

“Sorry,” Wanda coughs, ducking her head between her knees. “I guess I’ll get used to it.”

Peter smirks. “I’m actually impressed. Most people _do_ hurl after I drop ‘em.”

“Last time I did it, your hands were awfully unsteady.”

They both jump and draw together instinctively at the third voice that joins in. Scarlet is already crackling between Wanda’s fingers and Peter’s arm braced on his sister, ready to take her at the first sign of trouble and run. When he realizes who’s approaching them, he relaxes, and Wanda does, too.

“Erik,” Peter mutters by way of greeting. “Scared the shit out of us.”

“And too easily, at that,” he sighs, with no indication of apologizing for startling them. “You won’t be getting very far if you always let your guard down like that.”

Peter bristles, every part of him screaming to mouth off and talk shit back at him - but the words fall silent on his tongue, smothered by some sort of strange respect, because that’s his _father_ , and while it had never stopped him before, now he knows that Erik knows, and that mutual knowing makes it sort of...weird?

So he doesn’t say anything.

“What do you want?” Wanda shoots back in his place, shaking off the last touches of nausea. “We’re still going.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Erik says curtly. “Just...how long have _you_ known? What did she tell you?”

Considering they’ll probably never see him again after this, it won’t hurt to spill a little before they run off.

Peter shrugs. “She told us stories. Never mentioned a name, just talked about a guy she knew, who could do funky things with metal and liked to run headfirst into trouble. She didn’t tell me specifics until after the Pentagon stunt, actually.”

“Ah.”

If Peter didn’t know better, he’d think that Erik was truly, genuinely _smiling_.

“Did she keep any…?”

“Pictures? Not out in the house. Not after you were on the news back in the 60s. But - ” Peter buries a hand deep in his pocket, rummaging fervently through the junk. The folded photograph he finally produces is faded and worn at the creased edges. The couple in the picture is smiling, in that particular softness of old. “ - this used to be in our room. She gave it to us when we were little. Just so we would know. No name, just a face. We were too young when Cuba happened to make the connection.”

For years, he was just a face in a worn-out snapshot to them.

“Is it alright if I - ?”

“Sure.”

Erik handles the tired photograph with the utmost care, turning it over between callused fingers. He remembers when this was taken, some absent spring day when they had nothing better to do. He offers the picture back sharply, as if it had burned his hand. Peter slips it easily back into his pocket, knocking a few other things out in the process.

“Here, I’ll get it,” Wanda says, stooping to scoop the junk from the grass. There’s a crumpled movie ticket sandwiched in between an old baseball card and some spare change, not even worth a dollar. Two dull bracelets, too, interlocked together - she freezes when she recognizes the gaudy baubles dangling off of the rings.

“You kept these?” Wanda asks him, smiling strangely.

Peter cuffs the ground shyly with the toe of his shoe. “It was one of the only things of yours that meant anything. So I, uh, kept it with me when you left. It was the next best thing. It’s the one thing I have from home.” In the dark, their hands find each other.

“Wait,” Erik interjects, before Peter can put the bracelets away. “Where did you get those?”

The twins exchange a glance. “I don’t remember,” Wanda sighs. “We were little. Someone gave them to us. I can’t remember why.”

Erik remembers, with a rush of what feels like sick, sweet irony. “I made these. We were looking for students, back in the 60s, waiting for someone in a park. They never showed. But while we were waiting, these two kids were playing nearby, and they looked like they had just discovered their mutations. They wanted proof that we were the same. And I made these for them. A little boy proud of who he was, and a nervous little girl terrified of who she would become.”

And they look just the same as they did back then.

Their eyes are wide - the twins share another stunned glance as grief catches memories and sticks, clotted, in their throats.

In the middle of it all, Wanda breaks. They are twenty-eight, and their father has been with them, a piece of him, for years. Her tears come completely unwarranted, spilling out before she can stop them.

Ten years ago, Erik wouldn’t have been so moved. Now, he sweeps Wanda into his arms and lets her sob limply against his chest. Her curls remind him of her mother’s. “Oh, my darling...I had no idea. It wasn’t safe for me to stay, I feared putting your mother in unnecessary danger. I swear, if I could have, I - ”

“You would have stayed,” Peter finishes, swallowing hard. He, too, looks close to tears, and joins the embrace without much motivation. It’s not the family he’d always dreamed of, but it’ll do.

Wanda remembers the files folded away in her purse, wipes her tears away, and rustles through it. “These were your people,” she says more than asks, passing the papers to Erik. “That’s what I heard, at least.”

He hasn’t seen these photos in years - autopsies of teammates he lost decades ago. “Yes. They were with me.” Erik passes them back before he thinks too hard about it, and chokes back the feeling of vomit.

“The place that killed them is the same place that held me,” Wanda says solemnly, staring hard at the black-and-white post-mortem photographs as if they could tell her something. “Blackwell’s is number one on my list.”   
“You were there? In that facility?” Something hard catches in Erik’s chest at the thought that his daughter was tortured in the same place that murdered so many before her. “How long?”

“Eleven years,” Peter and Wanda both murmur, as she angrily stuff the pages back into her bag.

Erik’s hand brushes against hers. “I...what did you do that scared them so much?”

“I put a boy into a coma for two weeks when I was sixteen,” Wanda spits, reflexively scratching at her arms. “They tested on me, but they knew I was too valuable to kill. Too powerful. They wanted Peter, too - my mother succeeded in saving _one_ of us, at least.”

Power runs in the veins of his children: his daughter, who escaped a place that murdered some of the most powerful mutants he knew, and his son, who can bend time to his will. They are everything, somehow, that he hoped they’d be.

“Come on,” Erik finally says, ushering them into the dark after him. “If that’s what you want, I know a few people who may be able to help our cause. That is, if you’ll have me.”

 _And I will make up for twenty-eight lost years,_ he doesn’t add. _To give you both the freedom you deserve._

“We don’t plan on playing by the rules,” Peter warns him, a mischievous sparkle glimmering in his eyes. “We’re doing and taking what we want, morality be damned.

To their pleasant surprise, their father smiles again.

“And what are rules if no one ever dares to break them?” Erik inquires, with a curious look.

They will be the first of a new Brotherhood of Mutants, who will bow to no one and refuse to be stifled. They will become greater than gods and hold more power in one cell than a man would ever see in his life.

School is long past, being normal is a fading dream, and survival will no longer be a struggle. They will no longer hide what makes them special, whether the human race is ready for it or not.

For Peter and Wanda, nothing will be hard ever again.

“We should get going,” Erik continues, giving the dimly-lit manor far behind them one last, long glance.

The twins take each other’s hands firmly, and nod. “Yes, Papa.”

They have found each other, and they are home.


End file.
